![Fatos kongoli](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Fatos_kongoli.jpg)
Fatos Kongoli (born January 12, 1944) has recently become one of the most forceful and convincing representatives of contemporary
Albanian
Albanian may refer to:
*Pertaining to Albania in Southeast Europe; in particular:
**Albanians, an ethnic group native to the Balkans
**Albanian language
**Albanian culture
**Demographics of Albania, includes other ethnic groups within the country ...
prose.
Biography
He was born and raised in
Elbasan
Elbasan ( ; sq-definite, Elbasani ) is the fourth most populous city of Albania and seat of Elbasan County and Elbasan Municipality. It lies to the north of the river Shkumbin between the Skanderbeg Mountains and the Myzeqe Plain in central Al ...
and studied at the
Qemal Stafa High School
The Qemal Stafa High School is a high school, located in Tirana, Albania.
Founded in 1925 by Prime Minister Ahmet Zogu, as the ''Lyceum of Tirana'', it has many notable alumni, of whom 75 died in World War II and 14 were awarded the title People ...
, in
Tirana
Tirana ( , ; aln, Tirona) is the capital and largest city of Albania. It is located in the centre of the country, enclosed by mountains and hills with Dajti rising to the east and a slight valley to the northwest overlooking the Adriatic Sea ...
,
Albania
Albania ( ; sq, Shqipëri or ), or , also or . officially the Republic of Albania ( sq, Republika e Shqipërisë), is a country in Southeastern Europe. It is located on the Adriatic and Ionian Seas within the Mediterranean Sea and shares ...
.
Afterwards he studied mathematics in
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
during the tense years of the
Sino-Albanian alliance. Kongoli chose not to publish any major works during the
dictatorship
A dictatorship is a form of government which is characterized by a leader, or a group of leaders, which holds governmental powers with few to no limitations on them. The leader of a dictatorship is called a dictator. Politics in a dictatorship are ...
. Rather than this, he devoted his creative energies at the time to an obscure and apolitical career as a mathematician, and waited for the storm to pass. His narrative talent and individual style only really emerged, at any rate, in the 1990s, since the
fall of the communist dictatorship.
His first major novel,
The Loser
''The Loser'' is a novel by Thomas Bernhard, originally published in German in 1983.
Plot introduction
The novel does not take place at the time of the events recounted, but at the time its narrator recalls them. There are three main characters ...
(''I humburi'', Tirana 1992; English edition, 2007), is set in March 1991, when over 10,000 refugees scrambled onto a decrepit and heavily rusting freighter to escape the past and to reach the marvelous West. There they washed up, unwanted, on the shores of southern Italy. At the last moment before setting sail, protagonist Thesar Lumi, the 'loser' for whom all hope is too late, abandons his companions, disembarks and walks home. "I returned to my neighbourhood at the nightfall. No one had seen me leave and no one saw me come back." The narrative of the novel returns at this point to the long and numbing years of the Hoxha dictatorship to revive the climate of terror and universal despair which characterized day-to-day life in Albania in the 1960s and 1970s. Thesar Lumi was born on the banks of a river (Alb. lumi) in the looming shadow of the people's own cement factory, which produced more dust than it ever did cement. Despite a skeleton in the family closet, an uncle who had earlier fled the country, Thesar manages to get himself registered at the university, and penetrates briefly into a milieu which is not his own and never will be, that of the ruling families of Albania's red aristocracy. "At a tender age I learned that I belonged to an inferior race or, as I saw things at the time, to a category of mangy dogs to be kicked about and chased away." Thesar, whose fate in Albania's hermetic and suffocating society has been sealed once and for all, returns to live a life of futility and despair in a universe with no heroes. Far from the active protagonist struggling to control of his own destiny or even from the staid positive hero of socialist realism, Thesar Lumi is incapable of action and incapable of living. He is the voice of all the 'losers' who glimpse the silver clouds on the horizon and know full well that they will never reach them. "My existence is that of the mediocre, setting out from nothing and going nowhere." When first published in 1992, in what was a comparatively large edition of 10,000 copies, the novel found immediate success among the reading public.
Among Kongoli's subsequent novels are: ''Kufoma'', Tirana 1994 (The Corpse), the story of another loser caught up in the inhumane machinery of the last decade of the Stalinist dictatorship in Albania; ''Dragoi i fildishtë'', Tirana 1999 (The Ivory Dragon), which focuses primarily on the life of an Albanian student in China in the 1960s; and ''Lëkura e qenit'', Tirana 2003, a tale of love and forgotten affections. Kongoli's novels have been translated into
French,
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
,
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
,
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
,
Esperanto
Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communi ...
,
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
and
Slovak.
Sources
Albanian literature from Robert Elsie
Books by Fatos Kongoli
Books by Fatos Kongoligjemite e mbytura
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kongoli, Fatos
Albanian male writers
20th-century Albanian writers
21st-century Albanian writers
Albanian mathematicians
1944 births
Living people
Qemal Stafa High School alumni
People from Elbasan
Socialist realism writers